Why is America a do-nothing country?

[NoTeaPartyPleez]

We citizens put the country on our backs. We aren't the do nothing country, our politicians are the people who do nothing. Get it straight!

Agreed, but who voted for these politicians? We did. People are so fucking lazy they just rely on political ads on t.v. to decide who to vote for. And money buys those ads. Lobbyists and special interest groups provide the money. Circle competed.

 

[bripat9643]

Umm... GPS and the internet were brought about with massive government involvement through grants and the military. And you can thank NASA for alot of the tech advances of the last 30 years.

The military created GPS, but the government had very little to do with the Internet. That claim is a liberal myth. As for NASA, what technical advances is it responsible for?

The government had a lot to do with the invention of the internet. ARPA, the agency responsible for it's creation, is part of the U.S. Department of Defense.

A couple other accomplishments you mention, such as mobile phones and laser eye surgery, weren't originally developed in the U.S.

The federal government had very little to do with the invention of the internet. ARPA developed one small piece.

 

[aaronleland]

The military created GPS, but the government had very little to do with the Internet. That claim is a liberal myth. As for NASA, what technical advances is it responsible for?

The government had a lot to do with the invention of the internet. ARPA, the agency responsible for it's creation, is part of the U.S. Department of Defense.

A couple other accomplishments you mention, such as mobile phones and laser eye surgery, weren't originally developed in the U.S.

Hmmm, yeah, mobile phones are an American Invention.

History of mobile phones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Motorola was the first company to produce a handheld mobile phone. On 3 April 1973 Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment in front of reporters, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.[5][6] The prototype handheld phone used by Dr. Martin Cooper weighed 1.1 kg and measured 23 cm long, 13 cm deep and 4.45 cm wide. The prototype offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge.[7] Cooper has stated his vision for the handheld device was inspired by Captain James T. Kirk using his Communicator on the television show Star Trek.[8]​

Russia may have tried laser surgery first, but America perfected it and made it affordable for everyone.

Predecessors to mobile phones had been in development since WW2. The first commercial mobile phone service was implemented in Japan, followed by a few Nordic countries. While the U.S. was instrumental in their development, to credit us alone with the invention of mobile phones would be extremely misleading.

 

[FJO]

Why doesn't the US do anything GREAT anymore. Why are we not leading the world in some project to make the world a better place?
During the Civil War Lincoln started the building of the transcontinental railroad. Teddy Roosevelt gave us the Panama Canal and the National Park System. Franklin Roosevelt gave America the Manhatten Project which produced the BOMB and more inportantly the first nuclear reactor. Eisenhower was responsible for the Federal Interstate Highway System. Kennedy led America and the world to the moon.
What major undertaking have we taken on since? Why wasn't America the first country to have a bullet train? Why are France and Japan ahead of us in these areas?
Why is America now a do nothing country (Wars and military action excluded, of course)? Why has America chosen to be a follower (and a damn poor one at that) rather than a world leader in some endeavor other than making war?
Think about it. Name the landmark achievements of Carter, Reagan, G. Bush, Clinton, GWB, and Obama.

Why do you only count government actions? Don't private achievements count? How many lives do you think have been saved by CT and MRI scanners or the advances in cancer treatments. And as mind boggling as that is, it barely scratches the surface of technological advancement when you look a advances in energy exploration and other commercial advancements. If you always look to government for satisfaction you should get used to being disappointed.

He doesn't count private achievements because he's a libturd who is trying to justify some massive spending program. He also doesn't count the internet, the cell phone, the flat screen TV. He doesn't count GPS, which is one of the greatest inventions of all time. He Doesn't count the artificial heart, artificial joints, laser eye surgury or other medical advances. The libturd isn't interested in advances that actually benefit humanity. He only cares about boondoggles that politicians can strut and thump their chests over.

And, OF COURSE, the TV remote, which allows unfortunate out-of-work folks to enjoy life for at least 99 weeks.

 

[aaronleland]

The military created GPS, but the government had very little to do with the Internet. That claim is a liberal myth. As for NASA, what technical advances is it responsible for?

The government had a lot to do with the invention of the internet. ARPA, the agency responsible for it's creation, is part of the U.S. Department of Defense.

A couple other accomplishments you mention, such as mobile phones and laser eye surgery, weren't originally developed in the U.S.

The federal government had very little to do with the invention of the internet. ARPA developed one small piece.

Packet switching and TCP/IP protocol was one small piece? You don't know much about how the internet works, do you?

 

[bripat9643]

The government had a lot to do with the invention of the internet. ARPA, the agency responsible for it's creation, is part of the U.S. Department of Defense.

A couple other accomplishments you mention, such as mobile phones and laser eye surgery, weren't originally developed in the U.S.

The federal government had very little to do with the invention of the internet. ARPA developed one small piece.

Packet switching and TCP/IP protocol was one small piece? You don't know much about how the internet works, do you?

Yes, that is one small piece. There were other competing network protocols in existence at the time. I know because the company I worked for used one called "token ring." TCP/IP just happens to be the one that won out. Furthermore, that's only a small part of the internet infrastructure. The DOD certainly didn't invent the Web browser, nor any of the network components that are needed to make the internet run. They had nothing to do with the PC, which is the basic machinery of the internet.

 

[initforme]

The US is a great place to live provided you grew up in a home where you had stability and a bunch of money so you could afford to go to college. We live in a country (always have) where if you don't come from money you can't expect to get ahead really. There are a few exceptions but to make real money you have to have it to begin with otherwise you will punch in to your job day after day until you get old at which time you are not wanted anymore in the work force because they can pay some younger person a smitten wage compared to yours. Why do we need to consider ourselves a "great" country anyway? What is wrong with status quo? If we are looking to live as the bible preaches we have totally lost our way. Greed has now taken over our soul as a nation.

 

[bripat9643]

The government had a lot to do with the invention of the internet. ARPA, the agency responsible for it's creation, is part of the U.S. Department of Defense.

A couple other accomplishments you mention, such as mobile phones and laser eye surgery, weren't originally developed in the U.S.

Hmmm, yeah, mobile phones are an American Invention.

History of mobile phones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Motorola was the first company to produce a handheld mobile phone. On 3 April 1973 Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment in front of reporters, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.[5][6] The prototype handheld phone used by Dr. Martin Cooper weighed 1.1 kg and measured 23 cm long, 13 cm deep and 4.45 cm wide. The prototype offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and took 10 hours to re-charge.[7] Cooper has stated his vision for the handheld device was inspired by Captain James T. Kirk using his Communicator on the television show Star Trek.[8]​

Russia may have tried laser surgery first, but America perfected it and made it affordable for everyone.

Predecessors to mobile phones had been in development since WW2. The first commercial mobile phone service was implemented in Japan, followed by a few Nordic countries. While the U.S. was instrumental in their development, to credit us alone with the invention of mobile phones would be extremely misleading.

Puhleeze. The U.S. made mobile phones a practical reality. Before the Motorola phone, mobile phones were impractical playthings or experiments.

 

[Londoner]

We citizens put the country on our backs. We aren't the do nothing country, our politicians are the people who do nothing. Get it straight!

As citizens, we use to join force and use Washington to build things that no single business could afford. No collection of businesses had the incentive or the capital to build the Hoover Dam, which allowed us to harness the water & energy of the Colorado River in order to build the modern Southwest.

No single business in the sixties had the incentive or capital to build the Space Program. Do you know the technology that came out of the Space Program? Do you know how the technology of the Space Program was used commercially - and the profits it enabled? Things like satellite technology came from citizens using the financial power of Washington to build things that no business or collection of businesses had the incentive or capital build.

Do you know how much profit the private sector has drawn from the satellite system and other technologies that came out of the Cold War Pentagon and NASA programs? We citizens controlled Washington and made it do great things - but your party convinced us that the Government could do nothing, so we gave up trying to make it do great things . . . as the donors of your party quietly built a lobbying empire and slithered quietly through the back door for subsidies and bailouts . . . and patent protection for their products . . . so that they could privately suck at the teat of big government and usurp all its resources as the commons and infrastructure withered. The tax payer spends trillions protecting Exxon's oil fields in Iraq as his schools and main street die. It was a fucking coup d'tat by the wealthy and you bought it.

The private sector gets trillions of dollars a year in subsidies, bailouts and regulatory favors (from patent protection to virtual monopolies over domestic sectors) ... and you don't see it, but if a dime goes to the middle class or the nation at large, it's called Socialism.

Son, you've been lied to.

The Reagan Revolution destroyed government so that a narrow group of Wealthy people could control all the country's resources. But it wasn't always like this. Indeed, our citizenry used the massive financial leverage of Washington to build a great nation. Great Presidents like Eisenhower put our veterans to work building infrastructure that would serve citizens and businesses for generations. Before Reagan's poisonous anti-government propoganda, Americans joined together and effectively used Washington as a tool to defeat the Nazis, build the Interstate Highways, build water and energy plants across rural America, and basically create the modern industrial infrastructure upon which commerce and progress depends.

But your party found away to destroy all this and remove common citizens and public investment from Washington. Now, large corporations lobby behind closed doors in order to secure subsidies that only benefit a narrow group of investors. You didn't make government smaller, you only changed who it served.

America swallowed poison in 1980 and now the patient is almost dead.

(Here's the thing son. The businesses which taught you to hate Washington - the businesses which fund Conservative & Libertarian think tanks, talk radio and FOX - are sneaking through the back door in order to peel away trillions in lobbying "favors" from the taxpayer. The Koch Brothers don't hate government - they extract billions of dollars in subsidies a year for their various businesses, many of them in oil. Do you know what their lobbying footprint is in Washington? They only teach you to hate government in order to remove you from the process so that they have more unrestricted access to the taxpayer's wallet. Your glorious fucking private sector - the pinnacle of Free Market Capitalism - is a lobbying machine which turned Washington into a private ATM for the wealthy. You've been lied to. They didn't make government smaller; they just changed who owns it and who benefits from it.)

 

[Avatar4321]

Our culture has been corrupted. We have been taught to depend on government for everything we have and in doing so we have too many who do just that.

The way to change that is to change ourselves and be a force for our culture instead of letting our culture be a force on us.